Scale (by Geoffrey West) - Part 24
When we invented automobiles - we wouldn’t have had in mind - that we’ll waste a lot of time stuck in traffic and keep traveling from home to work to back home and lose precious time. We only saw the upside of a technology when we invented it:
People tend to have an hour of daily “exposure time”; either they can be stuck in traffic or take a walk in the park or whatever - but people tend to have a roughly constant exposure time:
“Walking cities” tend to have a 5 km diameter on average due to the hard limit on travel convenience; as we got better transportation - we expanded the cities now most bigger cities can have maximum distance between “borders” around 40 KM. This is true - Bangalore has around 40-50 km distance as of now between its extremities:
This “exposure site” has important implications for designing cities that are good to live in:
Average walking speeds in bigger cities (up to an extent) are faster:
The actual number is - we see 10% increase in walking speed as towns get bigger into cities; at around 4mph the speed stabilizes due to human' physical limits:
Some cities such as Liverpool have introduced “fast walking lanes” so that people can walk faster, proving this principle in practice:
The study of various aspects of cities can be done via cellphone network data:
